Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 is not classic fantasy. Its formal name is Fantasia scientificta climaticus — Fantasy > Science Fiction > Climate Fiction — so in the grand scheme of things and as a benevolent dictator, I’m claiming it under the big umbrella.
What can I say? Things have been watery lately, with North Carolina still drowned, the wettest summer in history in my part of Virginia now giving way to what looks fair to be the wettest fall in history, and my back yard still looking like this:
Besides, it’s a good book, and I feel like writing about what a good book it is.
Therefore, let us not complain about whether or not New York 2140 is technically fantasy. It is, in the best sense of the phrase that animates all fantasy, a great “what if?” that also bids for a place in the pantheon of American novels, which I’ll explain in a bit, because there’s a lot of ground between here and there.
First, a disclaimer: this is the first Kim Stanley Robinson novel I’ve read, but it won’t be the last. I know nothing about his bio and don’t care to learn. If Eco taught me anything, it’s that the work stands apart from the author and should be judged apart from the author, as much as is possible. (That doesn’t mean that I can read Heinlein or Dick or Kipling without more than a twinge of conscience, but that’s a subject for next week — promise. Next week will be about uncomfortable authors and great books.)
Okay: on to New York 2140!
It’s around 120 years from now and, in the battle for the future of the planet, the oligarchy won. Sea level rose by fifty feet (a not-unreasonable forecast) before humanity started to get its act together enough to respond and, while the outcome was/is horrific, with mass extinctions, enormous loss of life, multiple refugee crises and everything that attends a global breakdown of order, humanity has adapted and survived.
Which means that New York now looks a lot like Venice, if Venice were filled with toxic waste. Buildings with foundations constructed on bedrock have been waterproofed inside and out, and mostly have survived, while anything built on fill has pretty much “melted.” The drowned parts of the city have evolved their own economies based largely on barter, while the “intertidal” is a mishmash of squatters, scammers, and rejects. The rich, meanwhile, live as they do all over the world — uptown, on dry land, in towers that pierce the clouds where they own entire floors that stand empty almost all the time, held ready for their owners to jet in for a week or weekend holiday, and protected by private security firms that operate more like mercenary armies.
And, like they do all over the world, the rich run an economy based on late 20th century speculation, with ephemeral wealth, automated trading, overleveraging, bubbles, the whole shebang. Late-stage capitalism gone rotten. What happens when market forces, invisible and unaccountable, devastatingly powerful, pick the intertidal and drowned parts of the drowned coast as their next target for investment and its first cousins, gentrification and hostile takeovers of communal properties? Well, that’s the start of New York 2140.
The novel hit with a metaphorical splash last year, making a number of “Best of” lists while also garnering some fine reviews, such as this one from the New Yorker (and they should know), as well as a fair number of damning-with-faint-praise reviews, which I will not link. Some critics write that Robinson is too sunny, that his characters are too shallow, too well-educated, too resilient, too decent, to be New Yorkers, that the author’s outlook is too utopian; N.K. Jemison observed in the New York Times that Robinson, a Californian, mostly gets New York right, but
The novel deftly conveys its unnerving strangeness through interludes and asides: “New York, New York, it’s a hell of a bay” does have the ring of a culture adapting itself. (It’s also the quintessential outsider’s touch, since it riffs on a 1940s-era Broadway musical. Romanticizing the past and predicting the future while eliding the present: This is what tourists do.)
Eight viewpoint characters intersect to tell the story, which centers on the residents of the cooperative Met Life building in the drowned zone. Muff and Jeff, a pair of down-on-their luck computer coders, are veritable orphans taken into the building as charity cases, while Stefan and Roberto, a pair of 10 or 12-year old “water rats” are actual orphans who live under the building dock. There’s Charlotte, in charge of the building, a bureaucrat dedicated to doing the right thing for its own sake; Gen Octaviasdottir, NYPD Investigator, a solid, tall, imposing and extremely capable black woman from the tough streets and likely named in homage to Octavia Butler since, as has been noted in many places, her name does not accord with Scandinavian naming practices and their patronymic traditions; Franklin Garr, callow day trader and author of the Intertidal Property Pricing Index on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, financial wunderkind and hedge fund shark; Vlade, the Met Life’s building super and the glue that holds everything together, Amelia Black, part-time resident of Met Life and animal rights star who uses her popular cloud show (the future of You-Tube, cable, Netflix, Amazon and All Media?) and her airship Assisted Migration to slow the extinction rate.
These seven perspectives weave disparate story lines into one large plot. The eighth voice? That’s a citizen, who serves as a kind of Greek chorus, supplying history, evolution, market analysis, and all the third-party information (“info dumps — on your carpet!” [p. 141]) needed to make the plot tick along. The reader is invited to ignore or skim the citizen’s smart-assery, but that would be a mistake.
Eight different viewpoints, each one written in a different narrative style. Mostly third-person perspective, close or distant, mostly past tense, but showcasing Robinson’s considerable writing chops. Franklin tells his story in first person, sometimes past tense as if in diary entries, but sometimes lapsing into present and, unlike most first-person present narration, it’s not annoying or pretentious. The citizen speaks in second-person present directly to the reader, while Mutt and Jeff’s sections read like Samuel Beckett if Beckett wrote computer code. In the hands of a lesser writer, the mash up would be cacophonous; in Robinson’s hands, it becomes a glorious chorus, a tour de force not unlike Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, also a New York novel but without McCann’s literary pretension.
No, Robinson has pretensions all his own, and they’re aspirational. Where McCann evokes Joyce, Robinson’s draws his models closer to home: Whitman, Twain, Melville, and the fabulous storied city itself.
Then after the storms, in the silver brilliance of late winter, the cold can freeze everything, and the canals and rivers become great white floors and the city is transformed into an ice carving of itself. This magical chilly time breaks up and all of a sudden it’s spring, all the black trees tippled green, the air clear and delicious as water. You drink the air, stare stunned at the greens; that can last as much as a week and then you are crushed by the stupendous summer with its miasmatic air, the canal water lukewarm and smelling like roadkill soup. This is what living halfway between the equator and the pole on the east side of a big continent will do: you get the widest possible variance in weather, crazy shit for day after day, and just as the cold is polar, the heat is tropical. Cholera festers in every swallow of water, gangrene in every scrape, the mosquitoes buzz like the teeny drones of some evil genius determined to wipe out the human race. You beg for winter to return but it won’t.
Days then when thunderheads solid as marble rise up until even the superscrapers look small, and the black anvil bottoms of these seventy-thousand-foot marvels dump raindrops fat as dinner plates, the canal surfaces shatter and leap, the air is cool for an hour and then everything steams up again and returns to the usual fetid asthmatic humidity, the ludicrous, criminal humidity, air so hot that asphalt melts and thermals bounce the whole city in rising layers like the air over a barbeque.
Then comes September and the sun tilts to the south. Yes, autumn in New York: the great song of the city and the great season. Not just for the relief from the brutal extremes of winter or summer, but for that glorious tilt — that you had been thinking you were living in a room and suddenly you are struck by the fact that you live on the side of a planet — that the great city is also a great bay on a great world. In those golden moments even the most hard-bitten citizen, the most oblivious urban creature, perhaps only pausing for a WALK sign to turn green, will be pierced by that light and take a deep breath and see the place as if for the first time, and feel, briefly but deeply, what it means to live in a place so strange and gorgeous. [pp. 263-264]
Stefan and Roberto, the water rats as Vlade affectionately calls them, are our Huck Finns (with a touch of Pip from Great Expectations). Their friend, the aged intertidal squatter Mr. Hexter (possibly an homage to J. H. Hexter, an eminent American historian), first introduced as a kind of whacked-out old crank with an echo of Oliver Twist’s Fagin, puts the boys onto a treasure hunt that draws in other characters. For all the complaints about stock characterizations, Robinson develops his characters in unexpected but entirely consistent ways; for all the grit and pollution and violence and sabotage and general unpleasantness of a post-contemporary world, the novel is utopian — not in a pollyannish way, but with a sense that everything else has been tried and has failed, so why not try something good? Or as Charlotte, facing an influx of refugees, thinks
They [the refugees] were grateful for anything, and this too showed in their faces, and this too had to be ignored, as it was just another facet of their desperation. People didn’t like to feel grateful, because they didn’t like the need to feel grateful. So it was not a good feeling no matter which end of it you were on. One did good for others not for the others’ sake, nor for oneself, which would be a little sanctimonious, at best. This seems to suggest that there was no reason at all to do good, and yet it did feel like an imperative. She did it for some kind of abstract notion, perhaps, an idea that this was part of making their time the early days of a better world. Something like that. Some crazy notion. She was crazy, she knew it; she was compensating probably for some lack or loss; she was finding a way to occupy her busy brain. It seemed like a right way to behave. It passed the time in a way more interesting than most ways she had tried. [p. 224]
When the whole system is so corrupted that there’s nothing else to do, why not do right?
This seems to be the guiding ethic for all the main characters, a motley family formed by circumstance and desperation in the Met Life tower, a family that coalesces when Mutt and Jeff try to hack the stock market and mysteriously disappear, and Charlotte and Gen Octaviasdottir set out to find them, and along the way discover powerful threats from an oligarchy that has decided their part of the city — and every other drowned city around the world — is ripe for buyout or, failing buyout, takeover. Along the way Herman Melville, who lived a block from Madison Square and passed through every day, casts a long shadow and becomes the object of a quest for two Ahab-like adventurers. Walt Whitman occupies prime real estate, as it were, in the chapter introductions, especially later in the novel, his glorious paeans to individuals in the crowd.
A great many reviewers have focused on the book as science fiction/climate fiction/utopian vision/social satire and critique, but I don’t think anyone has looked at it as an American novel about that most American of cities, and the latest in a grand tradition of novels about what it means to be American. Yes, the characters are, by and large, devoid of that most malevolent of human impulses — greed — but they are also a self-selected dozen in a city of millions, each one bound by circumstance and necessity to their group, with all the obligations that group identity implies; there’s a Dickensian richness and feel to them, and a growing warmth as the narrative matures. Also, but 2140, money is ephemeral and cash doesn’t seem to play much of a role in day-to-day life. So, apparently greed is passé.
It’s not a plot spoiler to note that in a drowned city where wolves range the Jersey shore and muskrats outnumber residents in the Bronx (by a wide margin), where buildings in the intertidal zone “melt” and knock down other buildings, filling the canals with yet more toxicity and debris and death, in a world where the rich have only gotten richer and government only more toothless, something’s gotta give. For a drowned and dire future, New York 2140 doesn’t offer a way out; it’s a hymn to survival, a lesson in market economics, and a blueprint for revolution.
As promised, next week: ethics. Or, can we recommend Huck Finn? a.k.a. “When politics and literature clash, whose values should lead?” Until then, may you stay warm and dry, or cool and dry, depending.
Reference
Robinson, Kim Stanley, New York 2140. New York: Orbit, 2017.
Note
Last week’s poll about a group read of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell broke down 67% in favor with a strong component wanting to wait a while before reading. So we’ll do that, and revisit a reading schedule in a few months. Cold weather is conducive to heavy books.